Environmental sustainability in supply chains

In almost all industries companies are confronted with the sustainability challenge induced by climate change, end of fossil fuel and scarcity of natural resources, just to name a few. In general, sustainability management—the so-called triple bottom line—seeks to balance the economic, social and environmental performance (e.g. CO2, waste, or resource consumption). Traditionally, the development of supply chains is driven by measures like costs and customer service. More recently, in view of the sustainability challenge environmental issues are increasingly taken into consideration, for instance, by adding environmental constraints to supply chain models or by considering carbon taxes and emission trading schemes or by including the effect of green house gas emissions in the choice of the transportation mode. This naturally leads to multi-objective considerations in order to analyze the trade-off between economic and environmental performance measures. The primary objective of this special issue is to reflect the recent developments in sustainability management in supply chains and related transport systems and to examine research issues concerned with quantitative and other modeling techniques to improve the environmental performance of supply chains in industry. For this special issue twelve papers have been selected for publication after a thorough peerreview according to the standards of the FSM journal.